If yes, you will know that shared vocabulary is one of the most important things to consider in language choice.

Shared vocabulary - a language shortcut

Shared Vocab, or "vocabularly divergence" for linguists, means how many words in languages are shared or used to be the same hundreds of years ago. Languages come in families, they are related and they share common roots - a bit like real families.

Knowing more about the relations between different languages is not just interesting, but also extremely helpful. If you choose to study a language which belongs to your native language family, you can have an easier time learning new words. This is because you already know them. The grammar will also feel a little more familiar, and so on. In short, many people consider closely related languages easier to learn.

Let's take a look

So, above you see a few families of languages. English sits at the centre, but this one is much cooler than just looking at how easy it is to learn German or French.

Just look at how many languages there are in the world!! And think of

how half of Wales is learning Welsh even though that's not even a particularly related language for English speakers?